Increase Your Organic Traffic by 22%, Start Blogging!

How would you like to increase the amount of organic visitors to your website by 22% without spend any money at all?

Sounds good eh?

Well it’s pretty easy to do, simply start a blog on your ecommerce website, post a few articles, and put your feet up.

The Reason for My Blogging

One of the outcomes of my recent mini crisis was a decision to try and convey our expertise more through the website.

At the end of the day we are experts in our field however I didn’t feel that this was really put across well on our site, my fear was that people were simply shopping on price and we were losing out to cheaper imitators of our products.

Knowing that our products were far superior to what else was being offered on the market was frustrating to say the least, but it also left us an opportunity to do something about it.

We had a blog which we had some existing content on but to be honest it was not updated very often, I felt this would be the perfect place to post some content attempting to display our expertise and overall business philosophy.

Type of Content Published

Okay, the decision to publish more content was made, but what type of article should we be putting up there?

Well, my first port of call was writing a list of the biggest questions we get asked by customers and seeing if we could address some of these in article format.

I also looked at writing something which attempted to speak to our core audience and then relate to them why our solution was the best one for their needs.

Finally I put together some content featuring our key products and writing why certain decisions had been made and the logic behind them.

11 Articles in 3 Days

To be honest I didn’t specifically set out to write 11 articles, they just seemed to flow one after another over the space of 2 – 3 days.

In terms of length they started at around 600 words running all the way up to a mammoth 1,200 word essay!

We didn’t post them all at once, the first one went up the 10th April and the last one went live on the 19th.

To promote the content on the site we did two things. Firstly we included links to two of the articles directly from the site homepage, we have a space for featured news which I updated.

The next thing we did was link from our computers category page to an article which provided an overview of our products, this article then linked to some more in-depth content pieces taking about specific options in detail.

This linking helped drive visitors to the content and will also have helped the search engines find the content quickly to index it.

Traffic Increases

For the three week period after the first bits of content went live our organic traffic levels increased by 22.01% compared to the three week period directly before it launched.

It should be noted that the previous period did include the Easter break however our organic traffic remained pretty consistent across that period. If we compare back to a period at the end of March the increase was still over 20%.

Keyword reports don’t really show any particular new keywords that amassed the bulk of the traffic increases, it was more a combination of terms which each drove more visitors collectively giving the overall boost.

One of our articles focused on laptops and organic traffic including this keyword jumped from 1 visit to 27, similarly we had a large content piece talking about trading computers, visits including the trading keyword jumped over 33%.

People entering the site through the blog pages directly (i.e. they searched on Google and it returned a blog page in the results) jumped 136% however this only accounts for 26.7% of the extra traffic, this means that adding the content must have also increased the rankings of other non-blog pages to account for the rest of the traffic increases.

Side Effects

I must say that since loading the content orders have increased as have enquiries, whilst I can’t put all this down to the blog content it would be silly to think that it has had no impact.

Overall I think what is clear is that these extra content pieces have helped drive more visitors and also helped convert more of these visits into enquiries and sales, not bad for a few days’ work really!

Do you have a blog section on your site? If not it may be time to put one up there, the benefits are well worth the effort.

Comments

Blogging is a great way to not only increase your authority in Google but to show your customers that you have lots of useful content that you want to share with them on a regular basis. Answering your own specific FAQs could be the tip of the iceberg – there are lots of e-commerce questions being asked in forums every day – do a bit of research to see what’s being asked then if you think you can answer, write an informative blog that tries to address the question – this should help to drive in more traffic and should help to attract a potential new customer base.

Also blogging is a great way of communication with customers. Our company has a static website and also we run a blog and this is an effective way to build relationship with your clients by presenting and describing your services or products, answer customers’ questions and attract more potential customers.